Cannot upgrade indices because the following indices are missing primary shards – How to solve this Elasticsearch exception

Opster Team

August-23, Version: 6.8-7.15

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Briefly, this error occurs when Elasticsearch tries to upgrade indices but can’t because some indices are missing their primary shards. This could be due to a node failure, network partition, or disk space issues. To resolve this, you can try to restore the missing shards from a snapshot, if available. If not, you may need to recreate the index and reindex the data. Additionally, ensure that your cluster has enough disk space and that all nodes are properly connected to the network.

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This guide will help you check for common problems that cause the log ” Cannot upgrade indices because the following indices are missing primary shards ” to appear. To understand the issues related to this log, read the explanation below about the following Elasticsearch concepts: admin, shards, upgrade, indices.

Log Context

Log “Cannot upgrade indices because the following indices are missing primary shards” class name is TransportUpgradeAction.java. We extracted the following from Elasticsearch source code for those seeking an in-depth context :

 Set indicesWithMissingPrimaries = indicesWithMissingPrimaries(clusterState; concreteIndices);
 if (indicesWithMissingPrimaries.isEmpty()) {
 return iterator;
 }
 // If some primary shards are not available the request should fail.
 throw new PrimaryMissingActionException("Cannot upgrade indices because the following indices are missing primary shards " +
 indicesWithMissingPrimaries);
 }  /**
 * Finds all indices that have not all primaries available

 

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